CSBG Archive

A Month of Art Stars – Marcos Martin

Every day this month I’m going to feature a current comic book art “star,” someone whose work I absolutely love.

I’m mostly going to try to keep from the biggest names as much as possible, because, really, do I need to talk more about the awesomeness of JH Williams, Frank Quitely and Darwyn Cooke? Here‘s the archive of the artists mentioned so far!

Here’s an artist whose great work has thankfully begun to get the appreciation it deserves.

Enjoy!

Marcos Martin broke into the American comic book industry through a fellow Spanish artist, Javier Pulido, who needed another artist to help him with meeting deadlines for a Robin Year One mini-series Pulido was drawing.

Martin filled in, and as a result, got to draw another Year One mini-series for DC, this one starring Batgirl.

While on Robin, Martin basically just aped Pulido, on Batgirl, Martin allowed his own style to shine through, which you can tell with these amazing covers showing of Martin’s stunning sense of design…

He next did some cover works (including some great Green Arrow covers) before Breach, a short-lived, but beautifully drawn series he did for DC.

In a nice piece of karma, Martin was filled in on Breach by Pulido on some issues.

After finishing Breach, Martin has not done a regular project since, doing covers for Runaways and an awesome Dr. Strange mini-series with Brian K. Vaughan (here are some sequential pages from it)…

See? Not only is he a great designer, but he can tell a story, too!

Recently, Marvel found a great showcase for his talents. Since it takes Martin awhile to produce his awesome art, Marvel has put him into the mix as one of the artists drawing Amazing Spider-Man. This way, Martin can take his time and they can fit him into the mix whenever he is ready.

Great idea, no?

Here are a couple of his amazing Amazing pages…

(click on the Spider-Man pages to enlarge)

And here is a great future cover he did…

It is great to see an awesome artist find a great showcase for his work like this!

DanCJ

I’ve followed Martin’s work since his early begins here in Spain, I have fond memories of an eight pages portfolio showcasing some X-Men pin-ups inserted in the middle of a post-Jim Lee X-men issue (in its spanish edition, of course).

Those portfolios were a great addition to the books most of the time, some of the artists involved were Jesus Merino (Superman), Rafa Garres (Lobo) and Javier Pulido (Catwoman).

Sam

Crash-Man, don’t know if you know this but ASM comes out 3x monthly now, so there’s a constantly rotating team of writers and artists. That’s how Martin can get slotted in for a few issues every few months.

Awesome. Thanks for the bio – I only became aware of the guy’s work when he did the Dr. Strange mini-series. I’ll have to go back and check for some of the earlier stuff. His work on Spider-Man has been, well, amazing.

Apodaca

My love of Breach is well documented here. A sadly underbought and underrated book. Marcos Martin is definitely one of the reasons I love it so much. I recently picked up Doctor Strange: The Oath, and even thought I’ve never read a Doctor Strange book before, I’m really looking forward to it if just to see Martin’s beautiful art.

Marc Kandel

Jonny K

Actually, it was then I realised I liked Doctor strange, and that the three odd little minis (The Oath, because I like BKV, X-Statix, because I like them, and Defenders the Giffen/DeMattis serie, becuase I liked those creators), meant that there had actually been a lot of good Strange Stories under the radar…